Morgan Healy

Scholar at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge

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Scholar, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge

Ninety percent of a child's brain develops by age five and the brain's neural architecture is set by age six. Investment in quality early education services (including parenting programmes) has a higher economic and social return than investment in education services at any other age. And yet, early education services remain chronically undervalued, underfunded and underexplored. For her dissertation at Cambridge University, Morgan plans to address these issues by designing a play-based parenting intervention that helps young children develop key higher cognitive capacities, called executive functions. Her hope is that this intervention will address gaps in existing research and can be integrated seamlessly into early childhood programming across the health, education, and social service sectors in Brazil and elsewhere. Prior to Cambridge, she worked at the Harvard David Rockefeller Center in Brazil where she led strategy efforts and content re-design of Harvard's Certificate for Early Education Leadership. She also worked as a fellow with the Mayor of Baton Rouge on the city's Cradle to K Parenting Programme and lived in Belo Horizonte, Brazil as a Fulbright scholar. Morgan graduated with a Masters in International Education Policy from Harvard in 2019.